Tuesday, August 10, 2010

I had a hell of a time having health issues which made me come late to the venue . Praveen the early bird speaker (aka come at 8 to learn more ) had already started and some 30 people have turned up was the ooutput I got from swapnil via sana's cell .

I hurried up and saw nice activity going on with interested people on day 2 on packaging .

Well praveen's way of debian development could be said to be like this .

A review of the important terms and then like get into an upstream package find a man page bug and then submit the bug to debian . The coolest thing which happened .. and which never happens at any place is

Kushal : the upstream guy .

praveen: finds a bug patches it

Kartik : approves it in debian as a DD.

Also as praveen said to me it was a great live interactivity as Kushal and praveen worked together live in front of people by arguing on the package,bug license and with the Debian developer chipping in .. it really made an awesome combination whose demo could the best someone could ever get !! ( Yeah COFSUG ,PICT and other pune students - I envy you )

FOSS in Education was handled by Vikram by using the ekalavya example .

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Me and Vivek walked to the lab from the seminar hall where j4v4m4n was taking a session . After his session we planned to go somewhere to eat . Well vivek wanted to learn more so did I as we don't know what happened at this place.

Anyways as we were getting down vikram was returning from a visit to MG road . The cool thing was some new students were turning up by 8 PM :)

But we were leaving ! Kartik just returned from his hanging out with kushal . So kartik took care of the students while me , praveen,vikram,vivek,raghavendra and vipul have gone to eat again somewhere near MG road. I remember us fighting for locations,gprs ,opus on the main road it was fun that we were all damn tired.

After the dinner we had a small walk to get an auto where vivek left and a phrase of mine triggered a flame war lol ( I do that often :P )

Me and praveen took an auto to foss lab where kartik was still going on with the students . Nice to see motivated students staying till 10 in the night andd they were not local hostel students they have come from different colleges and we asked them about the user group status and they are very interested to expand it in college while abhijit gave them suggestions and all of chipped in with more advices lol .

It was so late in the night but I still wanted to blog about the event made a call to the eternal volunteer swapnil who came and collected me to show his machine which unfortunately has a very bad motherboard and a overheating processor from pentium4

Well we browsed photos till the router collapsed and I couldn't blog anymore .. atleast got the pics and their metadata right :)

The sad thing and horrible part of me was to see swapnils eye lids dropping .. OMG what a pest I was !!

Well how did it start ? It started with a debian developer waking me up calling my name ! Abhijeet who had to hurry to the venue at 8 Am while me praveen and the DD had to go to the Modern cafe for our breakfast ( 3 idly + 2Cafe+ 1T ) which we finished quickly and after some crossing of the road ended up at the seminar hall2 where we heard from abhijeet that vikram has arrived well it was a small meetup of old friends .

Then I came inside and started bugging people about the network .. well it looked like I was the network guy !

The funny thing was the router was set up in the middle of a hall with no wired connection to it . Abhijit requested other faculty's own network which more or less was a lifeline . I kind of shared the password with very less people .

I was more or less trying to get Wifi working . Peeking in a little bit to hear praveen & omkar - the deb and ubu guys speaking together .vikrams talk was attended by me . Well it was energetic .Vikram in his L10n and I18n talk he showed a POT file and also showed the amount or contributions needed in each language . He also encouraged a new language proposal for rajasthani .We breaked for lunch when I went with shirish we had a discussion about calendars. Is there a free web application alternative for google calendar and a bit about all LUG's.

I met karunakar with whom I discussed about debian installer work being started . Also karunakar has told me that there is a simple guide to install fonts.Post lunch discussion was with vikram when we had some catching up to do .

Then Kartik after the lunch in 'how to contribute' session he showed us how to classify bugs and how to report them . He showed a sample bug which was a comment that something was not working .

Kartik had an issue with buggy wicd to connect to the wireless. I even made my router unencrypted which unfortunately didn't help .

Then people with and without laptops were divided . The machine less people went to the lab which was handled by praveen and omkar.Lab_foss (inputs from COFSUG student): He started by asking people to google for 'maintenance guide' so as to make the students self sufficient . He explained the new words in the guide like 'sponsors,mentors,upstream etc'

Licensing issues while packaging were exlained . After that the steps of packaging in debian were explained. We downloaded the source package of lekhoni which was written by kushal . He explained the code compilation process and how to resolve the dependencies which might occur during compilation .

One bug which involved correct version No's of lekhoni in readme was found and are kept for reporting tomorrow .

A small interview with COFSUG student : How to contribute session and the practical session on source code compilation and fixing bugs during packages was interesting .

compared to other tech events its more technical and it was done in small time ..the response was not expected.

Finally the credit goes to abhijith and his team of volunteers who made it happen !

Friday, August 06, 2010

It all started in morning when I met piyush and swapnil the local COFSUG members .

Our discussion started on Ubuntu,debian ,fedora. and why they were still on dual boot . The limitations of running VS.net is there . Its all ubuntu dominated world on COFSUG which is a good place for getting debian contributors ;)

Then I got a call from pravi with instructions on things to do . After that I went to the FOSS lab which kind of was our adda all the time . Its a lab of 50 Ubuntu machines .

I started on the live image and virtual box .. but was told by praveen to use th existing one . Added to that mine didn't boot . So we kind of added to that machine . The lab had some cleaning and teaching going on we guys ie me some volunteers started working on stuff. I on the meanwhile gave a nice introduction to sana khan on how X,GTK,QT,KDE and gnome are inter dependent . She also had got a good practice on apt,sources.list, & vi which more or less will be helpful for tomorrow session .

Madhur and Avinash are the main guys working of rthe live image sometimes assisted with swapnil . Some girls were also trained on ubuntu and gpg keys.

By the time praveen and kartik came it was getting dark but volunteers who went for a breakfast returned and there was an informative session on GPG keys where lot of questions on cryptography were asked . I also had a silly doubt on what is a 'fingerprint ' and how do you relate it with public key .

Well before that we had an introductions session in which abhijit sir was given all the praise :)

Finally the most important thing was water was arranged and yeah there was a discussion on putting map posters sign boards ... the virtual image and how do we share it .